The closing sentence of the My Wheels chapter for my previous practical car spoke of trading the recently battered 2011 Forester. The Subaru had been quite good to me and I’d had every intention of continuing to drive it for several more years. Instead, that battering caused me to move to an updated and differently colored version. Reminiscent of the move that replaced the red 1998 Corvette with a blue 2006 model, the red 2011 Forester was replaced with a blue 2018. However, not only is a 4-door SUV quite unlike a 2-door sports car, the two blues are worlds apart. The Corvette’s Daytona Blue was kind of exciting. The Forester’s Quartz Blue Pearl is kind of boring.
My first documented trip in the 2011 Subaru included a stop in Columbus, Ohio, where I had the clever (to me) idea of photographing the car under a Denny’s sign. So naturally (to me) I thought I should do the same thing with the 2018 car. That turned out to be much easier said than done. It seems the Denny’s restaurant chain has fallen on hard times and reduced their presence considerably. There are none left near Cincinnati and only one in Columbus and it lacks the big elevated sign I sought. The picture above was taken at a restaurant near Terre Haute, Indiana. Unlike the similar shot of the red Forester, it was not taken on the car’s first trip but on its second most recent, number eleven.
The red Subaru made its first documented trip just about a week after acquisition. The blue one was in my position for over four months before it was so honored and it would be another four months before it actually appeared in a trip journal. It was the middle of July 2017 when I stopped at the dealer with the scrunched and scratched red Forester thinking it might be close enough to the end of the model year to find a bargain. To my surprise, there wasn’t a single 2017 Forester left on the lot and only a few of other models. I didn’t get the close-out deal I’d hoped for but I did get a deal that was reasonable and put me in a 2018 vehicle when 2017 was barely half over.
I believe the new car stood at approximately the same point in Forester model ranking as the previous one had but it had seven years worth of new bells and whistles. Some, like the rearview camera and adaptive cruise control, I appreciated almost immediately, and it took just one road-crossing deer to convince me that the pre-collision braking was a good thing. The lane departure warning eventually won me over but I’m still not a fan of Lane Keep Assist which tries to keep you from departing a lane without signaling. Fortunately, in my opinion, this latter feature defaults off.
My first trip after the swap was with an uncle and cousin and used the cousin’s Cadillac. The next trip journal involved the Society for Commercial Archeology in Cincinnati where most of the miles were covered in a tour bus. Then there was a trip in the Miata before the Subaru was put to use on a Thanksgiving trip to Tennessee. It also carried me on a Christmas trip that reached into Georgia and an early April trip to Pittsburgh, PA. It served to mark the “Prev” and “Next” links on the daily pages for those three trips but was otherwise out of sight. It finally broke cover on the late April end-to-end drive of the Jefferson Highway. There was a shot of it all clean and shiny at a car wash in Winnepeg, Canada, then the shot at left of the still clean car about to start down the first of many unpaved sections of the JH. A similar view of the car was incorporated into the cover of a book resulting from that trip, Jefferson Highway All the Way.
With the exception of a fly and drive trip that involved a rental car, The Forester has handled every trip since that 2017 Thanksgiving outing. It hasn’t appeared in a lot of pictures, though, and I suspect it has something to do with that “kind of boring” Quartz Blue Pearl paint. On the 2018 Christmas trip, I caught it in a nighttime shot at South 21 Drive In in Charlotte, NC. In April, it posed in Kentucky at the Cave City Motel as I headed to the Jefferson Highway Conference in Natchitoches, LA.
In June of 2019, on my way to the Lincoln Highway Association conference in Wyoming, I stopped by one of my favorite gas stations in Grand Island, NE. This was my first time at Kensinger Service since the 2016 passing of long-time owner Dick Grudzinski. I missed out on what is still a full-service operation by arriving after the day’s closing. That’s just one of the reasons this is not my favorite picture of the station. It might, however, be my favorite picture of the car.
To date, the blue Subby has carried me on an even dozen documented road trips and, as a very active member of my current two-car fleet, I expect it to carry me on many more. That’s assuming, of course, that I can avoid being stopped at the wrong light at the wrong time.
My Previous Wheels: Chapter 38 — 2003 Mazda Miata
My Next Wheels: Chapter 40 — 1997 Schwinn
Kind of miss that blue Corvette, though, and that one roaddog you like to scared to death in Kentucky that time.
That Kentucky near-miss scared me pretty good, too. I do sometimes miss the Corvette, but, even though I took mine on roads that many Corvette owners would avoid, I have to admit that the Subarus have taken me to places where a Corvette really could not.
Denny’s is alive and well in Indiana. They just opened a new one across the street from my subdivision. I used to love Denny’s. I ordered the Superbird sandwich a lot. But the quality of food went downhill about 10 years ago.
You can hardly go wrong with a Forester.
Interesting. I just assumed that Denny’s was fading everywhere. Once I realized the nearby locations were gone, I started doing some online searching whenever I was out of the area. That’s how I found the one in Terre Haute. Looking at the picture now, it does look fairly new and not old and ready to close. I’m sure I’ve eaten other meals there at some time but I can only remember breakfasts.
Subaru Forester is one of the first cars I associate with the word “practical”. There’s not a hint of glamour but they do what’s needed. Most — but not all — people I know who have owned a Subaru had good experiences.